Ned Blackhawk is a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada and is a professor of History and American Studies at Yale. A graduate of McGill University, he holds graduate degrees in History from UCLA and the University of Washington. His essays have appeared in Ethnohistory, Journal of American of History, American Quarterly, Western Historical Quarterly, and The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, among others. His book, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Harvard, 2006) examines two centuries of Indigenous-imperial relations in the American Great Basin and particularly challenges the evolutionary theories of Julian Steward. It received seven professional awards, including the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize from the American Society for Ethnohistory and a Book of the Decade Award from Native American and Indigenous Studies Association . His most recent work is the co-edited volume with Isaiah Lorado Wilner, Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the Legacy of Franz Boas (Yale, 2018).
A member of the advisory board of Yale’s Native American Cultural Center, he also serves at the faculty coordinator of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America (YGSNA) and the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP).